A New Dimension of Health Care: Systematic Review of the Uses, Benefits, and Limitations of Social Media for Health Communication

By A. Moorhead, Diane E Hazlett, L. Harrison, J. Carroll, Anthea Irwin, C. Hoving. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2013

2,318 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background There is currently a lack of information about the uses, benefits, and limitations of social media for health communication among the general public, patients, and health professionals from primary research. Objective To review the current published literature to identify the uses, benefits, and limitations of social media for health communication among the general public, patients, and health professionals, and identify current gaps in the literature to provide recommendations for future health communication research. Methods This paper is a review using a systematic approach. A systematic search of the literature was conducted using nine electronic databases and manual searches to locate peer-reviewed studies published between January 2002 and February 2012. Results The search identified 98 original research studies that included the uses, benefits, and/or limitations of social media for health communication among the general public, patients, and health professionals. The methodological quality of the studies assessed using the Downs and Black instrument was low; this was mainly due to the fact that the vast majority of the studies in this review included limited methodologies and was mainly exploratory and descriptive in nature. Seven main uses of social media for health communication were identified, including focusing on increasing interactions with others, and facilitating, sharing, and obtaining health messages. The six key overarching benefits were identified as (1) increased interactions with others, (2) more available, shared, and tailored information, (3) increased accessibility and widening access to health information, (4) peer/social/emotional support, (5) public health surveillance, and (6) potential to influence health policy. Twelve limitations were identified, primarily consisting of quality concerns and lack of reliability, confidentiality, and privacy. Conclusions Social media brings a new dimension to health care as it offers a medium to be used by the public, patients, and health professionals to communicate about health issues with the possibility of potentially improving health outcomes. Social media is a powerful tool, which offers collaboration between users and is a social interaction mechanism for a range of individuals. Although there are several benefits to the use of social media for health communication, the information exchanged needs to be monitored for quality and reliability, and the users’ confidentiality and privacy need to be maintained. Eight gaps in the literature and key recommendations for future health communication research were provided. Examples of these recommendations include the need to determine the relative effectiveness of different types of social media for health communication using randomized control trials and to explore potential mechanisms for monitoring and enhancing the quality and reliability of health communication using social media. Further robust and comprehensive evaluation and review, using a range of methodologies, are required to establish whether social media improves health communication practice both in the short and long terms.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26be447a6d668aa19f3e550a7ff54103df0d7d54

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In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

Online communication, social media and adolescent wellbeing: A systematic narrative review (2014, neutral): “SNS’s however, are only one form of SMT (Moorhead et al, 2013).”
Who Uses Mobile Phone Health Apps and Does Use Matter? A Secondary Data Analytics Approach (2017, neutral): “There is increasing usage of health apps among health care professionals, patients and general public [8], and apps can play a role in patient education, disease self-management, remote monitoring of patients, and collection of dietary data [9-12].”
Social Media Use for Health Purposes: Systematic Review (2021, methodology): “The most recent comprehensive review of social media use for various health-related purposes was conducted by Moorhead et al [12] and included studies published between 2002 and 2012.”
Understanding factors affecting patient and public engagement and recruitment to digital health interventions: a systematic review of qualitative studies (2016, neutral): “DHIs range from telehealth and telecare systems [4], to patient portals and personal health records (PHRs) [5, 6], mobile health applications [7], and other online platforms and devices [8].”
Social Media: A Review and Tutorial of Applications in Medicine and Health Care (2014, background): “complexity of the data synthesis process, there was a 3-month lag between the data collection and the completion of this manuscript (despite efforts to monitor new applications and tools during this time, it is possible that new developments during this time period may have been missed, such as [109”
Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice (2020, background): “…or misleading health information shared on social media and that social media users may not be aware of misleading information or conflicts of interest especially when the platforms promote popular content regardless of whether it is from a trustworthy source (Moorhead et al. 2013; Ventola 2014).”